Embers

After a global neurological epidemic, those who remain search for meaning and connection in a world without memory.

On its surface, "Embers" is a very simple movie. We have a series of people who have lost their memory to varying degrees. Some can remember for a day, some only minutes. A few seem to be able to push the limits a little bit further. Good science fiction is taking reality as we know it, and pushing the edges out just a bit to what is not yet actual, but possible. And "Embers" succeeds in that endeavor.

Writer-director Claire Carre was fully aware of the importance of keeping the infection idea grounded in reality. "I did a ton of research, looking at different neurological case studies, and specially looking at the lives of people with amnesia… The characters in the film suffer from symptoms similar to the type of brain damage you might get from viral encephalitis." Thus, what we see in "Embers" is entirely possible, as unlikely as it might be that amnesia would occur on a (presumably) global scale.

Whether intentional or not, the film evokes the idea of location as a character in its own right. The filmmakers went out of their way to find just the right settings: an abandoned church in Gary, Indiana and an underground bunker in Poland are two prominent examples. The bunker shown in the film is not a set, but was built as part of the Nazi line of defense during WWII. The spiral staircase scene is real: the stairs run ten stories deep with over twenty miles of underground tunnels to explore. The locations serve as characters because they tell as much of the story – perhaps more – than the humans, showing how much the world has fallen into decay.

Within the simple plot structure, we are left to find subtle messages on our own. At least two dichotomies are evident: Hope versus Chaos, and Freedom versus Safety. Freedom versus Safety is a bit more obvious, as the character of Miranda and her father have a discussion touching on these themes. After years of isolation, she longs to be free, to search for her mother or just to see new surroundings. Her father, perhaps wiser, tries to explain how she is the safest she could ever be: one step outside, and she risks falling victim just like everyone else. So which is the right way to live: alone and safe, or free and struggling?

The character of Chaos is in the form of a man, but could just as easily be a metaphor for chaos in general. The world, left to its own devices, will inevitably decay and turn to dust. He is part of that process, just working at an accelerated rate, killing and smashing as he plows through life like a hurricane. Countering him is Boy, who stands as a metaphor for hope. Just as Chaos wanders, so does Boy, and we get the impression that maybe, possibly, he has not been affected by the virus. Because he is mute we can never fully gauge his memory, but he seems to comprehend the passing of days better than anyone else. If there are more Boys (and Girls) in the world, it may not decay and chaos may not reign after all. This one character (Boy) inverts the whole narrative from a tragic, depressing tale into one of hope.

"Embers" is a complicated film disguised as a simple one. For anyone who wants to see a film about a glimmer of hope in a world at its lowest, this is the film for you. "Embers" premieres July 22 at the Fantasia International Film Festival.

People probably expected something very sciency, with special effects, with the big contagion that gets solved by the brilliant scientist, but it is nothing like that. It just describes, in a pretty slow pace, the aftermath of a global contagion that makes everybody amnesic. People that love each other forget the other exists at random moments, smart intellectuals fight all day to remember who they were by reading their own books (man, that should be another movie altogether!), rich people have built bunkers in which they educate their children who, unfortunately, reach adolescence and become stupid, and so on. There is no storyline, no explanation, no closure. Nothing too brutal, nothing too bloody, just people being people without being themselves.

It is not a great movie, it will not be remembered throughout the ages as a classic of direction or acting or storytelling, but it's not bad either. It's a "what if?" scenario played close to the end and well interpreted.

I saw some favorable comments about this, and it was sci-fi which sometimes opens up interesting possibilities, so I really wanted to like this movie. Unfortunately I did not see this going anywhere. It was very predictable, shallow and clichéd, even naive. Toward the end I was hoping to see some kind of point to justify the favorable reviews - instead the movie just ended. Technically it was OK. The actors were OK. And yes, it was not that generic Hollywood garbage, as mentioned in another review. Yet, the ideas of this movie have already been seen and used so much better in many other movies. If you have not seen those other movies yet, good for you, you are in for a treat! Unfortunately for me, I have seen those other movies.

3/31/18. This was a visual meditation about the importance of memory. When you lose your memory you lose your humanity. There is very little in terms of story lines, just little vignettes of people trying to make it through the day with little memory of who they are and what just happened to them. Very sad. Just think of all these people having Alzheimers and you will understand just how tragic it is to lose one's ability to remember memory. In some ways it's better to have bad memories than to have no memories at all.

I could not help but keep thinking about the Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel "100 Years of Solitude" and the insomnia plague that invaded the town of Macondo along with contagious amnesia that attacked many of Macondo's residents. They would have to write notes like "this is a cow, you must milk it daily" and label the chairs and tables. I also kept waiting for Embers to take me to a similar place of magical wonder. It almost did but then the movie was over.

There were also many technical inconsistencies in the plot that, for a thought-provoking movie proved too much of a distraction for viewers' busy minds that are trying to absorb every detail on the screen and make something out of them. If Miranda and her father had been in the bunker for 9 years, why does everything outside have such a "recently abandoned" appearance? Is the whole thing an experiment? a hoax? Nobody is dirty, people are relatively neatly groomed (i.e. nobody has 9 years' worth of unkempt hair). Also, why do Miranda and her father speak Spanish if she was born in Singapore? Is she really who she thinks she is? Was the "self-check" a way to overcome the amnesia? a trick developed to help her be Miranda? was she really sick without her own knowledge? I mentally gave the movie the excuse that perhaps they were diplomats and moved on. But, after seeing the ending, it would have been so nice if the plot could have gone in any of all those other directions.

Perhaps I should mention that my father suffers from Alzheimer's, so lately I find myself looking for movies that play with the concept of memory and the memory of love. My mother recently told me the story of how the dog across the street "decided" to love my dad and how the dog would come over every morning, and how my dad would meet the dog every morning (sometimes "for the first time") and feel the happiness of new friendship. My mother would feel happy for my dad in those moments, even though my dad is very sick. She found the feelings conflicting. For those very personal reasons, the story of Ben/Mark and Katie in Embers was to me the only redeeming part of this movie. I kept hoping that they would stumble upon the child, then find a matching bracelet, and the child would love them... like my dad must do in his mind... but Embers never went there either.

True love is not something one decides to do, I believe it is a form of knowledge. We know that we love, we don't remember that we do. And that is the look I see on my father, even when he doesn't quite remember my name or thinks that I am my brother. If only the movie had gone there more. Then again, as some already hinted, we have seen that before in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Ironically, if I could forget reading that Marquez' novel, I might have liked this movie more.